When pandemics hit communities, women are bound to suffer as most of the responsibilities of ensuring food security lie on them. This article assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the role that church-going women play in food provision. The qualitative study used interviews and focus group discussions to examine the toll of the pandemic-induced restrictions, especially with regard to their disruption of activities that ensure the provision of food for the family. They sought to identify how an environment (...) as restrictive as the one that was imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic affects those largely responsible for food provision in urban Marondera – the women, in this case. The focus was extended to factor in how disasters and pandemics affect women and detract from their normative food procurement and provision roles in marginal societies and how these effects can be mitigated to allow women to carry on with their roles even in restrictive environments. This research was motivated by the recent COVID-19-imposed regulations that restricted the movement of people, restrictions that have only recently been relaxed and (in some cases) removed. We also sought to establish how gender roles are played out, together with whether they are exacerbated by pandemics, and in what ways these pandemics result in higher workloads on women. By utilising the Africana womanist theory, the study analysed women roles in food provision and food security in their societies within the restrictive environments of the pandemics.Contribution: This study concluded that there are gender inequalities that are exacerbated by these pandemics that result in higher workloads for women. It foregrounded how existing gender inequalities were exacerbated by the pandemic, resulting in higher workloads on women. It therefore recommended that women should form empowerment groups to help focus attention on food provision to mitigate challenges women face in this role. Finally, we averred that there ought to be consultation and participation of women on issues to do with pandemics to allow for their full and productive participation in critical roles of providing food. (shrink)

When we remember a past situation, the emotional import of the latter often transpires in a modified form at the phenomenological level of our present memory. When it does, we experience what is sometimes called an “affective memory.” Theorists of memories have disagreed about the status of affective memories. Sceptics claim that the relationship between memory and emotion can only be of two types: either the memory is about a past emotion (the emotion is (...) part of what is remembered), or it causes a present emotion (the emotion is a separable effect of the memory). We argue that there is a third option, which points to an emotional way of representing the past situation. Drawing from Peter Goldie’s account of mental narratives, we show that three levels of mental perspective are involved in memories: the perspective of the represented subject (the character, if there is one), the perspective of the representing subject (the author), and the intermediary perspective of the narrator (who may remain virtual). Affective memories are cases in which the narrator’s emotional perspective has direct implications for the author’s emotional perspective, even if the former typically differs from the latter. (shrink)

The notion of affective memory was first introduced by Théodule Ribot (1894), giving rise to a debate about its existence at the beginning of the 20th century. Although Vernon Lee did not directly take part in this discussion, she conceptualized this notion in a quite precise way, mainly in her book Music and Its Lovers (1932), clarifying the sometimes obscure formulations made by previous authors. In this short encyclopedic entry, I present Lee's characterization of affective memory.

This paper examines two phenomena that are usually treated separately but which resemble each other insofar as they both raise questions concerning the difference, if there is one, between so-called ‘real’ and ‘as if’ emotions: affective memory and imagined emotion. The existence of both states has been explicitly denied, and there are very few positive accounts of either. I will argue that there are no good grounds for scepticism about the existence of ‘as if’ emotions, but also that (...) the existing positive accounts of them are all explanatorily inadequate. Comparing the two phenomena directly, I contend, allows us to defend the existence of both by showing how they essentially involve the same ‘affective bodily imagery’. The final part of the paper offers an original, empirically informed account of the nature of this imagery, the role it plays in ‘as if’ emotions, and how it may help illuminate some important connections between memory, imagination, and emotion. (shrink)

It seems natural to think that emotional experiences associated with a memory of a past event are new and present emotional states triggered by the remembered event. This common conception has nonetheless been challenged at the beginning of the 20th century by intellectuals who considered that emotions can be encoded and retrieved, and that emotional aspects linked to memories of the personal past need not necessary to be new emotional responses caused by the act of recollection. They called this (...) specific kind of memories “affective memories” and defended their existence. My aim here is to expound the historical background of this debate as well as the characterization and development of the notion of affective memory since its first inception. I aim to show that although the debate was left unresolved and the term disappeared from academy around 1930, many of the characterizations of the nature of emotions and memory done by the advocates of affective memory have reappeared in the scientific agenda and been further developed during the last decades. (shrink)

To rethink history from the perspective of an economy of affects as they are engendered by beings ousted from the definition of the human, I will draw on two Caribbean texts, Anim-Addo's Imoinda: Or She Mho will Lose Her Name and Philip's Zong!. This essay discusses how these two Caribbean texts counterwrite the history of the slave plantation by staging and embodying the work of what I call an affective memory drawn from the history of the black subject (...) as a history of absence and reconstellated in the present as a history of being and community. This affective memory represents the being of the ‘living corpse’ and her making of a community as the subject of a new polity, the polity of decolonised beings. By drawing on these texts to demonstrate how they write the history of spectres, ruins and other communities, I discuss affective memory not as the absolute possession of a body, but rather as the alienated property of the body that can be reclaimed only by a community that, precarious and tentative as it is for it is a community of slaves and subjected bodies, remains the only promise for the future. (shrink)

Traces of many past events are often layered or superposed, in brain, body, and world alike. This often poses challenges for individuals and groups, both in accessing specific past events and in regulating or managing coexisting emotions or attitudes. We sometimes struggle, for example, to find appropriate modes of engagement with places with complex and difficult pasts. More generally, there can appear to be a tension between what we know about the highly constructive nature of remembering, whether it is drawing (...) on neural or worldly resources or both, and the ways that we need and use memory to make claims on the past, and to maintain some appropriate causal connections to past events. I assess the current state of work on situated affect and distributed memory, and the recent criticisms of the ‘dogma of harmony’ in these fields. I then deploy these frameworks to examine some affective dimensions of place memory, sketching a strongly distributed conception of places as sometimes partly constituting the processes and activities of feeling and remembering. These approaches also offer useful perspectives on the problems of how to engage – politically and aesthetically – with difficult pasts and historically burdened heritage. In assessing artistic interventions in troubled places, we can seek responsibly to do justice to the past while fully embracing the dynamic and contested constructedness of our present emotions, memories, and activities. (shrink)

Event-based prospective memory tasks require the realisation of a delayed intention at the occurrence of a specific target event. The present research investigates how performance in this kind of prospective memory task is influenced by the current affective state. By manipulating participants’ mood during intention realisation we tested two competing models of mood effects on memory (i.e., a capacity consuming account and a processing style account). Furthermore, we manipulated the valence of the target event to investigate (...) mood-congruency effects in prospective memory. No evidence was found for a mood-congruency effect, but the results showed that prospective memory performance increased with a sad mood. This effect is consistent with recent theories on mood-dependent processing-style regulation, postulating that a sad mood produces a more analytic and detailed processing style whereas a happy mood produces a more global and less detailed processing style. (shrink)

Current theories propose that our sense of curiosity is determined by the learning progress or information gain that our cognitive system expects to make. However, few studies have explicitly tried to quantify subjective information gain and link it to measures of curiosity. Here, we asked people to report their curiosity about the intrinsically engaging perceptual ‘puzzles’ known as Mooney images, and to report on the strength of their aha experience upon revealing the solution image (curiosity relief). We also asked our (...) participants (279) to make a guess concerning the solution of the image, and used the distribution of these guesses to compute the crowdsourced semantic entropy (or ambiguity) of the images, as a measure of the potential for information gain. Our results confirm that curiosity and, even more so, aha experience is substantially associated with this semantic information gain measure. These findings support the expected information gain theory of curiosity and suggest that the aha experience or intrinsic reward is driven by the actual information gain. In an unannounced memory part, we also established that the often reported influence of curiosity on memory is fully mediated by the aha experience or curiosity relief. We discuss the implications of our results for the burgeoning fields of curiosity and psychoaesthetics. (shrink)

The paper delineates a study of executive functions, construed as procedural working memory, from a motivational perspective. Since WM theories and motivation theories are both concerned with purposive activity, the role of implicit evaluations observed in goal pursuit can be anticipated to arise also in the context of cognitive control, e.g., during the performance of the Stroop task. The role of positive and negative affect in goal pursuit consists in controlling attention resources according to the goal and situational requirements. (...) Positive affect serves to maintain goals and means in the scope of attention, whereas negative affect activates the inhibition of non-functional contents, e.g., distractors and irrelevant objects. Adaptation to conflict proceeds via sequential triggering of negative and positive affect. Moreover, it was demonstrated that the focus on action or reflection changes the scope of contents subjected to implicit control. Therefore, I suggest that the motivational system, to a large extent, plays the role of the Central Executive. The paper opens a discussion and proposes studies on affective mechanisms of cognitive control. (shrink)

This article draws upon affect theory to analyze transformations of garage sale sellers through the exchange of their affectively charged possessions. Garage sales are awash with human emotion; they feature used personal belongings suffused with identities, histories, stories, and memories that are moved along with affect. The objects for sale are “sticky” in that they act as vessels and glue for strands of sentiment to reflexively pass between sellers and buyers, transmitting affective orientations, whether positive or negative. The (...) class='Hi'>affective elements of garage sale goods are contagious as they can intersubjectively leap from one body to another. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotions influence cognitive processes involved in memory. While some research has suggested that cognitive scope is determined by affective valence, recent models of emotion–cognition interactions suggest that motivational intensity, rather than valence, influences these processes. The present research was designed to clarify how negative affects differing in motivational intensity impact memory for centrally or peripherally presented information. Experiments 1 & 2 found that, relative to a neutral condition, high intensity negative affect enhances memory for centrally presented (...) information. Experiment 3 replicated this effect using another high intensity negative affect. Experiment 4 extended this by finding that, relative to a neutral condition, low intensity negative affect enhanced memory for peripherally presented information. Finally, in Experiment 5, the effects of sadness and threat on scope of memory were directly compared, finding that threat narrowed scope of... (shrink)

Violence in sexual-affective relationships among teens and young people is recognized as a social, educational, and health problem that has increased worldwide in recent years. Educational institutions, as central developmental contexts in adolescence, are key in preventing and responding to gender violence through implementing successful actions. In order to scientifically support that task, the research reported in this article presents and discusses a psycho-educational intervention focused on autobiographical memory reconstruction that proved to be successful in raising young women’s (...) critical consciousness about the force of the coercive dominant discourse upon sexual-affective experiences and memories. We examined among a sample of young women (n = 32, age range 17-30) whether reading a scientific text about love, the Radical Love book, modified autobiographical memories of violent sexual-affective relationships in line with preventing future victimization. This group was compared with a control group (n = 31, age range 17-30). Memory reports were collected before and after the reading and coded to analyze their content, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Memory quality features were assessed with the Memory Quality Questionnaire. A focus group was also conducted to examine the personal impact of the intervention on participants. Compared with controls, the experimental group had stronger critical memories (of episodes involving violence), an average decrease in positive emotions induced by recall, and an average increase in negative emotions. The results show the effectiveness of the reading intervention designed in relation to gender violence prevention, as they indicate the ability of the psycho-educational action to debilitate the force of the coercive dominant discourse in young women’s memories. The findings both advance knowledge on the reconstructive nature of autobiographical memories of violent sexual-affective relationships in female youth and indicate the potential of memory-based interventions as an instrument to prevent and reduce gender violence in school contexts. Teachers and teaching staff, and educational psychologists, among others, can benefit from these results by expanding the tools they have to address gender violence among female adolescents and youth. (shrink)

It seems obvious that various feelings are memorized, forgotten, and recollected to various degrees. Some of them are forgotten. Some of those forgotten can be recollected, while others are lost forever. For example, short and long-lasting feelings and shallow and deep feelings are memorized and remembered in different ways. In this paper I analyse from a conceptual point of view several categories of memory-of-feelings and offer a comprehensive map of them. In the end, the richness of categories in the (...) realm of memory is interpreted as a proof of the intricacy of affectivity. (shrink)

We examined the affective consequences of everyday attention lapses and memory failures. Significant associations were found between self-report measures of attention lapses , attention-related cognitive errors , and memory failures , on the one hand, and boredom and depression , on the other. Regression analyses confirmed previous findings that the ARCES partially mediates the relation between the MAAS-LO and MFS. Further regression analyses also indicated that the association between the ARCES and BPS was entirely accounted for by (...) the MAAS-LO and MFS, as was that between the ARCES and BDI-II. Structural modeling revealed the associations to be optimally explained by the MAAS-LO and MFS influencing the BPS and BDI-II, contrary to current conceptions of attention and memory problems as consequences of affective dysfunction. A lack of conscious awareness of one’s actions, signaled by the propensity to experience brief lapses of attention and related memory failures, is thus seen as having significant consequences in terms of long-term affective well-being. (shrink)

To model potential interactions, memory must not only mesh prior patterns of action, as Glenberg proposes, but also their internal consequences. This is necessary both to discriminate sensorimotor information by its relevance and to explain how go als about the world develop. In the absence of internal feedback, Glenberg is forced to reintroduce a grounding problem into his otherwise sound model by presupposing interactive goals.

To investigate whether making performance predictions affects prospective memory processing, we asked one group of participants to predict their performance in a PM task embedded in an ongoing task and compared their performance with a control group that made no predictions. A third group gave not only PM predictions but also ongoing-task predictions. Exclusive PM predictions resulted in slower ongoing-task responding both in a nonfocal and in a focal PM task. Only in the nonfocal task was the additional slowing (...) accompanied by improved PM performance. Even in the nonfocal task, however, was the correlation between ongoing-task speed and PM performance reduced after predictions, suggesting that the slowing was not completely functional for PM. Prediction-induced changes could be avoided by asking participants to additionally predict their performance in the ongoing task. In sum, the present findings substantiate a role of metamemory for attention-allocation strategies of PM. (shrink)